Madame de Staël

by Bella Duffy

Madame de Staël was far from sharing these feelings. When anything had to be accomplished by her father, she was of the opinion of Calonne, in his celebrated answer to Marie Antoinette—“Si c’est possible, c’est fait; si c’est impossible, cela se fera.” And undoubtedly M. Necker did his best on returning to power; but, in spite of his honesty, good faith, and unquestionable abilities, he was not the man for the hour.

Very likely, as his friends, and especially his daughter, asserted, no Minister, however gifted, could have succeeded entirely in such a crisis; and doubtless he was as far as any merely pure-minded man could be from deserving the storm of execration with which the Court party eventually overwhelmed him. We have said that he did his best; his mistake was that he did his best for everybody. In a moment, when an unhesitating choice had become imperative, he was divided between sympathy with the people and pity for the King.

He returned to power without any plan of his own; but finding Louis XVI. was pledged to assemble the States-General, he insisted that the representation of the Tiers Etat should be doubled, so as to balance the influence of the other two parties. Royalists affirm that this was a fatal error, since from that hour the Revolution became inevitable. Madame de Staël, jealous of her father’s reputation, maintains that reasonable concessions on the part of the Court faction and the higher clergy would have nullified the danger of the double representation. But the point was that such an aristocracy and such a clergy were by nature unteachable; and every moment wasted in attempting to persuade them was an hour added to the long torture of oppressed and starving France.

The kind heart, liberal instincts, and administrative ability of Necker taught him that without the double representation the voice of the people might be lifted in vain. But the weakness of his character, and the awe of his bourgeois soul for the time-honored fetich of monarchy, prevented his understanding that the power he invoked could never again be laid by any spell of his choosing. By seeking to arrange this or that, to pare off something here and add something there—in a word, by trying to be just all round, when nobody cared for mutual justice but himself, he rendered a divided allegiance to his country and his King. If there were no conscious duplicity in his character, there was abundance of it in his opinions; and to say that nobody could have succeeded better is to beg the question. In the face of the savage, inflexible arrogance of the aristocrats and clergy, there was but one course open to a really high-minded man, and that was to leave the Court to its own devices, and, throwing himself with all of earnestness and wisdom that he possessed into the popular cause, to be guided by it, and yet govern it by force of sympathy and will.

He might have failed; in the light of later events, it can even be said that he would have failed. But such a failure would have been grander, more vital for good and sterile for harm, than the opprobrium which eventually visited the honest Necker and pursued him to his grave.

Needless to say that opinions such as these never found their way into Madame de Staël’s mind. On occasions—perhaps too frequently renewed—the portals of that enchanted palace were guarded by her heart. In her view, everything might yet be saved, were Necker only listened to and obeyed. “Every day he will do something good and prevent something bad,” she wrote to the reactionary and angry Gustavus, and thus betrayed that preoccupation with the individual, his virtues or his crimes, which, for all her intellect, blinded her not rarely to the essential significance of things.

With breathless interest and varied feelings of sympathy and indignation she watched the great events which now followed in rapid succession. Her father was monarchical, and believed that a representative monarchy on the English model was the true remedy for France. Madame de Staël—incapable of differing with so great a man—endorsed this opinion at the time, although eventually she became republican.

But nobody was republican then—that is in name; people had not yet realized to what logical conclusions their opinions would carry them. Madame de Staël, hating oppression, blamed the sightless obstinacy of the nobles, but, on the other hand, was but little moved by the famous Serment du Jeu de Paume. She deplored the rejection of Necker’s plan—that happy medium which was to settle everything, and stigmatized as it deserved the imbecility of the Court party, as illustrated by confidence in foreign regiments and the Declaration of the 23d June. Always optimist, and confident of the inevitable triumph of Right over Might, she clung to the belief that a thoroughly pure character, in such a crisis, was the one indispensable element of success.

The mysterious nature of Sièyes repelled her; she preferred the virtuous Malouet to the titanic Mirabeau, and was almost as blind as her father to the enormous electric force of the tribune’s undisciplined genius. For if often prejudiced, she rarely was morbid, and false ideas did not dazzle her. No splendor of achievement unaccompanied by loftiness of principle could win her applause. But she failed to grasp the fact that perfection of moral character, by its very scruples and hesitations, is necessarily handicapped in any race with the velocity of public events. No man can bring his entire self—very rarely can he even bring all that is best of himself—into a struggle with warring forces and contradictory individualities. In such a contest, swiftness of insight, power of expression, and force of organic impulse are the only factors of value. In supreme moments of action, men are greater than themselves—made so by the sudden, unconscious contraction of their complex personality into one flame-point of consuming will.